It is understood that humans dedicate over 50% of brain function to visual information processing (see, e.g., Richard Mark Friedhoff and Mark S. Peercy: Visual Computing, Scientific American Library, New York, 2000).
The brain performs an astonishing mapping of visually acquired information to reflect a physical reality, and results in an efficient and faithful representation of the relationships and patterns that exist within the information (see, e.g., Nahum Gershon, Stuart Card, and Stephen G. Eick: Information visualization tutorial, from Proceedings of the conference on CHI 98 summary: human factors in computing systems, pp 109-110, 1998). For example, the brain has the ability of picking out a familiar face from simply a glance at a crowd of otherwise unfamiliar faces.
The parallel process of visual perception, as opposed to an inherently serial process such as reading text, increases information uptake and understanding. The highly parallel processes that handle visualization use preconscious mechanisms can produce recognition of familiar patterns far more efficiently and quickly than serial processes. For example, the process of facial recognition as a preconscious process is much faster than the process of reading comprehension, which may include cognition by viewing text, localizing to mental linguistic model, comprehension of meaning, etc.
Sonification is the mapping of data to non-speech sound. More specifically, sonification is the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purposes of facilitating communication or interpretation. Further information about sonification using parameters of pitch, volume, timbre, duration frequency, amplitude and rhythm can be found in G. Kramer: Auditory Display, Sonification, Audification, and Auditory Interfaces, Addison-Wesley, 1994.
It has been found that bi-modal visual and auditory mappings provide a more accurate understanding of the presented information and situational context. More information about bi-modal visual and auditory mappings can be found in Suresh K. Lodha, Abigail J. Joseph, and Jose C. Renteria: Audio-visual mapping for GIS-based data: an experimental evaluation, in Proceedings of the workshop on new paradigms in information visualization and manipulation in conjunction with the eighth ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, pp. 41-48, 2000.